That was the only thing wrong with this life, the fear of arrest. Could that possibly be a cop over there, could some old score have suddenly blown up, could he be on a wanted list without knowing it? This wouldn’t be the first time a guy squealed on everybody else he knew in order to keep from doing a little time himself, and an airport was a natural place to look for a wanted man.
Guardedly, Wycza looked around the waiting area, but he couldn’t see any more of them. Just the one grinning clown over by the wall, who was still looking at him.
Waiting for the boarding to start? Waiting to collar him when he started toward the plane?
Wycza found himself wishing he had a gun in his luggage, despite the danger of air marshal searches.
He had never taken a fall, had never spent even one night in jail, and he wanted it to stay that way. Because he knew what would happen to him in jail, he would die there. A year, two years at the most, and Dan Wycza would be dead.
There were things he needed in order to stay alive, things beyond the simple food and shelter and clothing the prison would supply. Exercise, for instance. He needed to be able to run, to run for miles and to do it every day. He needed to work out in gyms whenever he wanted. He had to keep using his body, or it would dry up and die, he knew that with utter certainty.
And women. He needed women almost as much as he needed exercise. And special foods: steak, and milk, and green vegetables, all properly cooked and not steam-tabled till all the nutrition was out of them. And food supplements, vitamin pills and mineral pills and protein pills.
Not in jail. In jail he wouldn’t be able to exercise, not properly. And there’d be no women, and none of the food or pills he needed. In jail he would shrivel up, his teeth would rot, his muscles would sag, his body would shrink in on itself and start even before he was dead to decay.
He wasn’t going to jail. If it came down to it, if it was down to it right here and now, he wasn’t going to jail. There are two ways to die, fast and slow, and he’d rather go out the fast way. He wouldn’t go to jail because in order to put him in jail they’d have to lay hands on him, and before they could lay hands on him they’d have to kill him.
Movement. Wycza lifted his head, and faintly reflected in the plate glass in front of him he could see the young guy coming this way. Wycza carefully folded his magazine and put it away in his jacket pocket. Every muscle in his big body was tensed.
The young guy passed between groupings of plastic seats and stopped in front of the glass, just to Wycza’s right, looking out at the plane. Wycza kept his head down, watching the guy from under his brows, and after a minute the guy turned and gave him a cheerful smile and said, “Hello, there.”
Wycza lifted his head. He felt dangerous, and he looked dangerous. He said, “Something?”
The young guy didn’t seem troubled. Still smiling, he said, “I wonder if you know a friend of mine in Tyler.”
What’s this? Wycza, frowning massively, said, “No. I don’t know anybody in Tyler.”
“This friend is named Parker,” the young guy said.
A cop. A definite cop. “Never heard of him,” Wycza said.
“He lives on Elm Way,” the young guy said.
“Don’t ring a bell,” Wycza said.
The young guy’s expression began to change; doubt was creeping in. “Are you sure? I could have sworn you were somebody on your way to see my friend.”
“Not me, friend,” Wycza said. “You got the wrong guy.”
The guy shook his head, obviously all at sea. “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I troubled you.”
“Yeah, sure.”
The guy started away, and Wycza reached in his pocket for a magazine. Then the guy suddenly laughed aloud, and turned back, and gave Wycza a huge happy grin. “Well, of course!” he said.
Now what? Wycza waited, saying nothing.
The guy came over closer, bent down so no one else in the waiting area would be able to hear what he had to say, and whispered, “You thought I was a cop!”
Wycza still did. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said.
The guy dropped down into the seat on Wycza’s right, and said, quietly but excitedly, “My name’s Devers, Stan Devers. Parker never told you anything about me?”
“I told you before, you—”
“Wait a minute now,” Devers said; if that was his name. “Didn’t Parker tell you there were other people coming? Doesn’t it make sense there’d be one or two on this plane? I’ll tell you, I worked with Parker twice before this. I’m the one set up the air-base payroll job upstate here about five years ago. You ever hear of that?”
“You’re still making a mistake,” Wycza said, but he was no longer entirely sure that was true. He didn’t know anything about an air-base payroll job, but Devers’ line had a ring of reality to it.
“The other one,” Devers said, still talking low and fast, “was hijacking some paintings last year. We worked with, uh, Ed Mackey. You know him?”
”No.”
“Handy McKay.”
That was a name Wycza knew. He also knew that McKay had retired a few years ago. Meaning to be clever, he said, “You worked with Handy McKay last year?”
“Don’t be silly,” Devers said. “He’s up there in his diner in Presque Isle, Maine. I hid out with him when I first went on the bent. You want me to describe him to you? He lips his cigarettes something fierce.”
That was true. Wycza found himself grinning, then immediately sobered up again. “You got a good line of talk,” he said.
“You’re a tough man to convince,” Devers said. “What does it take?”
Wycza wanted to believe the kid, but caution was strong in him. It had to be. “Why brace me?” he said. “What’s the point?”
Devers shrugged. “Why not? We’re both going the same place for the same reason. Why not talk, have a pleasant trip?”
Wycza studied him a minute longer. “You’re a strange guy, Devers,” he said.
Devers’ smile broadened. “Stan,” he said, and held out his hand.
One more hesitation, a brief one. Then Wycza shook his head and said, “Yeah, I guess I believe you.” Taking Devers’ hand, he said, “I’m Dan Wycza.”
“Dan and Stan.” They shook on it, and Devers said, “Glad to know you, Dan.”
* * *
Fred Ducasse barely made the plane on time. The passengers were already boarding when he got to the gate. He submitted his small canvas bag to a luggage search, and was the last person to board the plane.
It was a fairly small plane, one class, with three seats to the left of the aisle and two to the right. Less than half the seats were occupied, so even though he was last, Ducasse could just about pick his spot. He preferred the rear, so he moved that way down the narrow aisle, holding his bag ahead of himself.
On the left, two men were in casual low-voiced conversation. One of them was a young good-looking guy with curly blond hair, and the other was a bald giant of about forty. They made a strange-looking pair, and Ducasse glanced at them curiously on the way by. The young one looked up at the same time, and for just a second their eyes met. It seemed to Ducasse, as he looked quickly away, that the guy had had a questioning look in his eyes, as though wondering if he maybe knew Ducasse from somewhere. Ducasse looked back at him again, but he wasn’t looking up any more. He was deep in his conversation with the bald one, and Ducasse was sure he’d never seen either of those two before.
He was just settling himself into a window seat well back of the wing when the plane started taxiing, and a minute later the stewardess started broadcasting safety announcements. Ducasse settled in, watched out the window as the plane took off, and then drifted away into his own thoughts.
He hoped this one was really it. He’d been living on his case money for over a year now, he definitely needed something good, and he needed something soon.
He was a little worried about this being Parker again. Not that
he had anything against Parker, or Parker’s ability; it was just that Parker, too, seemed to be running a bad streak, and Ducasse was just superstitious enough to wish he was teaming up with somebody who’d been riding winners lately.
Two things with Parker last year, and both of them had gone to hell. A department-store robbery set up by a guy named Kirwan, and then an art-treasure robbery in California set up by a fool named Beaghler. Ducasse and Parker had been in on both of them, and neither one had happened. Then Ducasse had gone in on an armored-car job that hadn’t worked out, but while it was still on he’d tipped Parker to something involving hijacking paintings, and he’d heard that one, too, had fallen apart. So it had been a bad year all the way around, and all Ducasse hoped was that he and Parker wouldn’t between them jinx this new score, whatever it turned out to be. Something simple, that’s what he wanted, simple and clean and profitable and fast.
Gazing at that bald head up toward the middle of the plane, idly thinking his thoughts, Ducasse dropped off to sleep and didn’t wake up again till the plane set down at Tyler.
Thirty-nine
Hurley and Dalesia drove west toward Tyler, Dalesia behind the wheel of the stolen three-year-old gray Mustang and Hurley beside him bitching about Morse.
In the two weeks since the busted jewelry-store robbery, Hurley had spent most of his waking hours looking for Morse, the guy who had sold them the plan, but Morse had absolutely dropped out of sight. Dalesia had traveled with Hurley, not because he himself felt any rage about the busted plan—that extra alarm could have been put in at any time, it wasn’t necessarily Morse’s fault that he hadn’t known about it—but simply because there hadn’t been anything else to do.
Now there was something else to do. Parker had called and said he had something kind of unusual in Tyler and would they like to be counted in. Was there money in it? Yes, there was. Yes, they wanted to be counted in.
But still Hurley couldn’t get over bitching about Morse. “After this business,” he said, as they made the transition from the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Ohio Turnpike, “I’m really gonna take my time and find that son of a bitch. I’m one guy he doesn’t hide from.”
“I’m going to take my time, too,” Dalesia said. “I’m going to take my time up in the Laurentians, up above Quebec.”
Hurley gave him a quick look. “You think Morse is up there?”
“No, I think there’s a lot of trout up there,” Dalesia said. “You can go hunting, Tom, after this is over, but I’m going fishing.”
* * *
Ed Mackey and his girl Brenda drove north from New Orleans in a yellow Jaguar Mackey owned under his Illinois name of Edwin Mills. Hairy, stocky, just under average height, Mackey was about forty years of age and had an aggressive, pushing, cocky manner like a good club fighter. Though his chest and shoulders and back were covered with curly black hair, he was beginning to thin on top, a fact he usually hid, like now, with a cloth cap at a jaunty angle down over his eyes. He drove with his head back a bit, looking out from under the bill of his cap and through the narrow windshield of the Jaguar at the road unwinding toward Tyler.
Brenda said, “This fellow in Tyler. Isn’t he one of the people in that hijacking last year? Those paintings?”
“Parker, yeah,” Mackey said. “You remember him, the mean-looking one.”
“We went to that party with him.”
Mackey grinned at her. He really liked Brenda, she was okay. “That’s the one,” he said.
“He didn’t exactly turn me on,” Brenda said. A slender girl in her mid-twenties, Brenda was good-looking in a no-nonsense way, and had a lot of leg. She was the best woman Mackey had ever gone with, because she was easy in her mind; she knew who she was, and she liked who she was, and she was very easy to get along with. Most people, men and women, weren’t like that; most people didn’t know who they were, didn’t like who they thought they were, and weren’t at all easy to get along with.
“You’re okay, Brenda,” Mackey said.
She nodded, agreeing with him without making an issue of it, because she was thinking of other things. She said, “Do you think this one will work out?”
“It better,” Mackey said. “You know how nervous I get when I start wallpapering.”
“I don’t see why,” she said. “I never have any trouble at all.”
“Well, you always go to some guy behind the counter,” he told her. “He’s so busy looking at you, it don’t matter what you write on the check. You could put Fuck You down for your signature, they’d still cash it.”
“Don’t talk dirty,” Brenda said.
“In the car,” Mackey amended.
She smiled at him, with a sidelong look. “In the car,” she said.
* * *
It had been six years since Mike Carlow had worked with Parker; he was looking forward to seeing him again. Parker had been square the last time, when they’d knocked over that coin convention in Indianapolis, and it wasn’t too often you worked with somebody you could trust.
What had happened, Carlow had wound up in custody after the robbery, but Parker had gotten away with the coins. Another guy in on it, a Nazi named Otto Mainzer, had also been picked up by the law, and the only thing that had saved Carlow’s skin was Mainzer’s obnoxious personality. Mainzer had made the cops hate him so much that they offered Carlow a free ride out of town if he would put Mainzer on ice for them. Hating Mainzer himself, Carlow had sung like the Andrews Sisters and had come out of it all clean and clear and safe, and when he’d gotten home to San Diego, damned if Parker hadn’t sent him his quarter of the profits: fifty thousand dollars.
That had turned into the JJ-2. Three wins, two third places, and one spectacular crash at Ontario Speedway. A good car, the old JJ-2.
A car, to Mike Carlow, was something that took you from Point A to Point B in one second flat, regardless of the distance in between. That was the ideal, anyway, striven for but not as yet reached in either Detroit or Europe; or in the workshop of Mike Carlow. He was a racing driver, in his early forties now, who’d been at it since high school, when he’d started by pushing one clunker after another around the stock-car tracks. While still a teenager he’d designed a racing car with a center of gravity guaranteed to be unaffected by the amount of fuel left in the tank, because there wasn’t any tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, which would hold the fuel supply. When someone he showed the idea to objected that it might be a little dangerous to surround the driver with gasoline, he’d said, “So what?”
Racing cars would probably be his death, but until then they were his life. And if they didn’t cost so damn much to design and build and care for, he never would get involved in jobs with people like Parker, taking them safely and quickly away from the scene of a score. But they did cost, and he did refuse to simply become a hired hand for one of the major companies, so here he was again, back on the road, pushing his modified Datsun 240Z toward Tyler. And considering the different guys he’d driven for over the years in jobs like this, he was pleased that this time it was a score set up by Parker.
* * *
Frank Elkins and Ralph Wiss took turns driving their Pontiac down from Chicago. They’d worked together for fifteen years, they owned homes in the same Chicago suburb, their families visited back and forth, and it was beginning to seem that in a few years Elkins’ daughter Pam and Wiss’ son Jason would be getting married. Both wives knew what Elkins and Wiss did for a living, but the children and the cousins and the nieces and all the rest were kept in the dark. “We do specialty promotions,” Frank Elkins would say, if asked, and Ralph Wiss would nod. Specialty promotions.
Wiss was a safe man, a jugger, a man whose specialty was opening safes by whatever means was most appropriate. He was comfortable with liquid nitro and with plastic explosive, he was expert at peeling, he could drill out a combination lock or cut a circular hole in the top of a solid steel safe. He had helped to tunnel into vaults, to by-pass time locks
and to remove wall safes entirely, so they could be worked on at leisure somewhere else. A small narrow man with a concentrated look, Wiss was a skilled craftsman, as devoted to his work as any fine jeweler.
Elkins was a general purpose man, a utility infielder. He would hold the gun, or carry the duffel bag full of cash, or keep an eye out the front window. He was the eyes and the muscles, complementing Wiss’ brain. They knew one another completely by now, trusted one another, and worked together with no waste motion.
The last time these two had seen Parker was in Copper Canyon, the time the whole town had been cleaned out. Before that, they’d worked with him in St. Louis, hitting a syndicate operation, a place where the local bookies’ comeback money was collected. Normally, people like Wiss and Elkins left syndicate places alone, but at the time Parker had had some sort of feud on with a boss named Bronson, and since it was bound to be a safe and profitable score, Wiss and Elkins had been happy to work it with him.
They didn’t talk much on the drive, being too comfortable with one another to need to force conversation. They did both wonder aloud about the score they were coming down to, but they didn’t worry about it. Elkins said, “If it’s Parker, it’s all right.”
“He gets gaudy sometimes,” Wiss said. He was a man with no taste for melodrama at all. “But safe,” Elkins said.
Wiss shrugged. He was always guarded, always kept a little in reserve. “It’s worth the drive,” he said.
* * *
Philly Webb drove the Buick west from Baltimore. The new blue paint job sparkled at him from the hood, the new license plates were a complementary blue from Delaware, and the new identification in the glove compartment and his hip pocket said that the Buick was registered to one Justin Baxter of Wilmington and that he himself was the same Justin Baxter.
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